Basketball
The United States earned qualification spots for both men's and women's basketball by winning the FIBA Americas Championship 2007 and the FIBA Americas Championship for Women 2007.
The women's team successfully defended their 2004 Olympic championship against Australia in the gold medal game for the third consecutive Olympics. The victory allowed Lisa Leslie to join former teammate Teresa Edwards as the only basketball players to win four Olympic gold medals. After a disappointing third-place finish in Athens, the men's team adopted the name "Redeem Team." In the gold medal match, they beat 2006 FIBA World Champion Spain to give the U.S. its first gold medal in men's international competition in eight years.
Read more about this topic: United States At The 2008 Summer Olympics
Famous quotes containing the word basketball:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)